Sunday 12 August 2012

Potato (and slug) time

Had a lovely couple of hours on the plot today. We'd been expecting rain but still haven't needed to use our new brolly!!
We pottered around a bit. Jamie DID finish the digging on the new plot and fed the tomatoes, runner beans and peas with Growmore.  I earthed up the celeriac, some of them are bulbing up pretty well.

Celeriac
I took a few photos and pulled some potatoes; one Chopin plant and one Kestrel - both giving pretty good harvests of nice looking tubers (we forgot to weigh them before we'd cooked them) but there are a few holes.
Geophilus carpophagus
We did wonder whether this centipede had made the holes but it seems that it's slugs. (The centipede eats baby earthworms though, so isn't a particularly welcome guest.)
Slug hole
We weren't too concerned by these holes - they don't look too offensive and don't seem to be too deep, but when we cut into the spud it's a different story...

The inside story
Ugh, not nice.
NOTE TO US: Do not bake potatoes with small holes in them!!
Jamie's already talking about buying nematodes next year, though the problem is most likely because of the awful rain. The slugs that do this type of damage are Keel slugs - not the giants you see when you move anything outside at the moment, but fairly small ones (<6cm) which live under the ground.

Anyway, the potatoes tasted nice, just needed a few extra bits cut off! We also had lovely runner beans and the cucumber is for lunch - also great for a little snack whilst on the plot :-)

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